By Samantha Wortelhock
Original Painting and Limited Edition Giclee Print size: 700 x 1400mm

Dream Time

Three men

One Soul

In three different lifetimes

Each one embraces and surrenders some trust

In a purple dawn sky our man of the past drops bark wrapping for his newly caught fish. He mulches the land, his actions benign as the Endeavour sails in through sea mist.

Our present day man in the harsh midday sun lets go of his disposable bag.

He looks at his bottle and promises that this drink will be his last.

In that moment of Now, a powerful time, our man has reached the end of his road.

And like the wave behind him he breaks on the shore, a surrender which throws open a door.

One through which our past man enters and memory cells awaken within.

A new path is trodden, one which rekindles a life for a future self to begin.

And there we see him, in our future time, an Elder who throws away a script saying 'Sorry!'

For his own words are meaningful, loving and kind... more useful than political spin.

His hand stretches out to his Great Spirit Beings who look down from the light of the Cross.

They listen to our Elder speak of songlines which wrap themselves around stars and of stories which will never be lost.

For they sing their truth and the words settle deep in our hearts, a place where like seeds they can grow.

And in a celebration of love a whale sings his song, as he breaches with each waves' ebb and flow.

And the Great Spirits see him because they are him because we are them day and night.

And we look up at the stars, and at that moment connect with Spirits Nardi and Dung Dung who.

We all of a sudden recall, both black and white, from some past life as our ancestors too.

The Story Behind The Painting
Samantha had sold Dreamtime, a painting spawned from listening to Wardaman Elder Bill Harney and her great friend Professor Hugh Cairns, when she walked back in to her gallery to see it full of Aboriginal women who had travelled all the way from Casino to Byron Bay to see her work. A few days before this Samantha had spent time in the gallery with Digby Moran, one of the far north coasts’ finest Aboriginal artists. Digby had said little to Sam during that meeting but she had told Digby the stories to her paintings. What Digby said upon leaving that day was a comment about a painting he had painted depicting the genocide of his people, a comment which left a massive and sad impression on Sam. When the women arrived in the gallery they asked Sam to tell them the stories to the paintings and on leaving they said Thank you. They also said that what had broken their spirits was the genocide. Later Sam learned that these women had created a painting group to help them come to terms with the alcohol and drug abuse of their men. Exactly the content and point of Dreamtime. So began a life long mission to bring the message of these amazingly forgiving and sharing people in to the consciousness of Sam’s audience.

Within this painting of Byron Bay the landscape is split in to the past, present and future. Within the zones of time we see one soul in three lifetimes and in three age phases from young to old. Each soul surrenders one object and presents another. In the past, at dawn, he throws away a piece of paper bark in which his fish has been wrapped, a benign mulching as he presents his fish to the fire. In the middle, present tense, we see a middle aged man lost to drink as he throws away a plastic bag and lifts the bottle to his lips. It is this man who has the most powerful wave behind him, the wave a symbol of the collective consciousness and it's inevitable evolving forward movement. At that point of giving up and surrender, symbolic of the wave and the desperation this man feels, is his moment of metamorphosis. A moment of surrender when his past floods in to his present for transformation in to our future Elder. A man of honour and dignity, a man who throws away a paper stating "sorry" because no longer caught within the political web of words he embraces what he knows and shares his songline stories which cross the night sky with a generation yet to inherit the earth.